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Grisly London bombings video shown to inquest
Eerie footage of the devastation wrought by the 2005 London bombings was shown in public for the first time today at the inquests into the deaths of 52 innocent passengers.
Eerie footage of the devastation wrought by the 2005 London bombings was shown in public for the first time today at the inquests into the deaths of 52 innocent passengers.
The courtroom saw slow-moving, silent video from inside the Underground trains, revealing the bloody, scorched wreckage left by the three simultaneous suicide bombings.
The rush-hour explosions on three trains at 8:49 am on July 7, 2005 and a bus about one hour later, were the largest terror attacks on British soil.
The chilling police camera footage had been edited to ensure no human remains were shown.
One video made by forensics teams, starting seven hours after the blast, shows the empty platforms at Aldgate station, where seven innocent people were killed on a train.
Blood and rescue equipment are visible on the concourse.
It then enters the darkness of the tunnel, towards the stricken train.
The side doors of the second carriage, next to where suicide bomber Shehzad Tanweer stood, were blown out and buckled, with other doors in the second carriage similarly damaged.
Ladders go up to the train floor. The inside of the carriage was wrecked, the floor littered with debris. The ripped ceiling was spattered with a dark substance.
Newspapers, clothing and bags were visible. The seats were ripped up and apparently bloodstained.
Outside the train, twisted metal lay on the tracks.
One police officer described the soot-covered and bloodsoaked passengers emerging from the Aldgate tunnel as looking like "zombies".
"A number of passengers paint a terrible scene of mangled flesh, debris and metal which had descended from the ceiling," said counsel Hugo Keith, who presents the evidence to the inquest.
Keith went through each victim of the four bombings in turn, linking together witness reports to tell what happened to them.
Their stories paint a picture of Londoners going about their daily lives.
The victims were immigrants, young accountants, economics graduates, biomedical scientists, musicians, people soon to marry, commuters who had changed their usual routes, and men who had kindly let others squeeze onto the previous train.
Many wounded commuters tried to help their fellow passengers, attempting resuscitation, tying clothing or belts around injured limbs and laying coats over the deceased.
Many victims were alive after the blasts but did not survive.
